Who are Australia’s homeless?

The topic of Homelessness is one of the most frequently raised during our briefings to councils and communities across the country.

On March 14th, the ABS released ‘Estimating Homelessness‘. This eagerly anticipated publication comes out once every Census, and provides detailed counts and estimates of the number of people who are homeless or in substandard accommodation in Australia.

This version is from the 2016 Census, and is one of the last datasets to be released from it.

Collecting data on homelessness

Actually, data isn’t just from the Census. The ABS has teams of field interviewers counting homeless people via a special short form on Census night, but these data are supplemented by information from crisis accommodation providers and boarding houses to provide a more robust count. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to get a complete count of the homeless population, so these are estimates from a variety of sources.

At the 2016 Census, there were estimated to be 116,427 people homeless in Australia, an increase from 102,439 in 2011. This represents an increase of 13.7% on 2011, but the rate per capita only increased by 4.6%, to 49.8 people per 10,000 Australia-wide. So much of the increase is just due to Australia’s general population increase.

The breakdown by state is shown below.

HOMELESS POPULATION BY STATE/TERRITORY, 2016

State/Territory

Number of homeless

Homeless rate per 10,000 people

New South Wales

37,715

50.4

Victoria

24,817

41.9

Queensland

21,671

46.1

South Australia

6,224

37.1

Western Australia

9,005

36.4

Tasmania

1,622

31.8

Northern Territory

13,717

599.4

ACT

1,596

40.2

Australia

116,427

49.8

Source: ABS, Estimating Homelessness, 2016 (2049.0)

One number really stands out. While Tasmania recorded the lowest rate of homelessness, the Northern Territory had a rate of more than 10 times the next highest state, New South Wales.

This is largely due to the much higher rate of homelessness among the Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander population (361 per 10,000 across Australia, but 2,083 per 10,000 in the NT). That means that one in five Aboriginal people in the NT were classified as homeless. But the rate among Non-Indigenous people there was also the highest in the nation, at 84 people per 10,000.

The different types of homelessness

The ABS breaks the homeless population down into 5 “operational groups”. Homelessness does not just include people sleeping rough, under a bridge or on a park bench. This is a common view of homelessness, but this category made up only 7% of all the homeless population (8,200 people) in the 2016 Census.

Other, much larger categories include “Supported accommodation for the homeless”, (which includes crisis centres, domestic violence shelters etc), people staying in boarding houses, staying temporarily with other households but having no usual address (commonly called couch surfing).

Homelessness Category 2016

Homeless Persons

Persons living in improvised dwellings, tents, or sleeping out

8,200

Persons in supported accommodation for the homeless

21,235

Persons staying temporarily with other households

17,725

Persons living in boarding houses

17,503

Persons in other temporary lodgings

678

Persons living in ‘severely crowded’ dwellings

51,088

Source: ABS, Estimating Homelessness, 2016 (2049.0)

The largest single group, however, accounting for 44% of the homeless population Australia-wide, is people living in “severely crowded” dwellings.

Some may say these are not homeless, since they are living somewhere. However the definition of “severely crowded” is that a dwelling requires 4 or more bedrooms to accommodate its household adequately. Generally, this standard allows 2 people per bedroom (plus some more nuanced criteria around age and sex of children who can share a bedroom). So a dwelling requiring 4 extra bedrooms would be something like a 2 bedroom house accommodating 12 people. That’s pretty crowded!

This is the category which has seen most of the increase between 2011 and 2016. While it’s 44% of homeless across Australia, it’s 80% in the NT – indicating the significant problem with overcrowding in Indigenous communities. However, it actually decreased in the NT, while the biggest increase was in NSW, where it rose from 9,655 in 2011 to 16,821 in 2016, an increase of 74%! This may be an indication of housing unaffordability in NSW.

Characteristics of the homeless population

A few interesting characteristics of the total homeless population in Australia:

Males made up 58% of the homeless and females 42%. Males outnumbered females in every category, but particularly rough sleepers (66%) and boarding house residents (73%). It was close to even (51%-49%) in supported accommodation for the homeless.

This sex difference was mainly among the older population. Despite the elderly population in general being skewed towards females, the older homeless population was very male-dominated, with 59% male in the 75+ age range, and 65% aged 65-74. Among young people under 18, homelessness was about 50-50 male-female.

The highest rate of homelessness was in the 19-24 age range (95 per 10,000), but 16% were aged over 55.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 20% of the homeless population Australia-wide (3% of total population).

All categories of homelessness increased from 2011 to 2016, except for people in supported accommodation for the homelessness, which was largely flat.

In great news for Local Government, the ABS is now publishing homelessness numbers for Local Government Areas, as well as standard larger geographic units. Unfortunately, there’s not a huge amount of information available at the LGA level – only the total homeless population. Many councils rely on local surveys to provide more information on their local homeless population. Nevertheless, it’s great to have some data available at the local level.

The data shows that the Local Government Area with the greatest number of homeless persons in 2016 was in the City of Brisbane (5,813 people). However, it’s worth remembering that Brisbane has a population of over a million – much larger than any other LGA (The City of Sydney had 5,061, and East Arnhem 3,833 – indicative of the high rates in the NT). The next three are all in suburban Western Sydney, Cumberland, Canterbury-Bankstown and Fairfield – all indicative of a growing homelessness issue in that region.

For our Local Government clients – you can download these figures from the publication download page on the ABS website. Would you find it helpful to see homeless population figures directly on your community profile highlights page? Let us know in the comments section below!

.id is a team of population experts who combine online tools and consulting services to help local governments and organisations decide where and when to locate their facilities and services, to meet the needs of changing populations. Access our local government area information tools here.

Glenn is an ABS data expert with huge intellect and capacity to convert demographic data into profound insights about places. He has contributed numerous blogs and consulting projects covering economic development, housing consumption and affordability, migration, fertility, ageing, role and function of ‘place’, communities of interest and more. Glenn works with over 120 councils bringing the client perspective into the development of our information products. He is a Census data expert, having worked at the Australian Bureau of Statistics for 10 years. If there's anything Glenn doesn't know about the Census, it's probably not worth knowing - so ask Glenn!

Dear Lailani, a major factor in the homeless problem would have to be marriage and family breakdown.
This would be aggravated by the contemporary phenomenon of ‘shacking up’, which I recall once reading as ‘serial monogamy’.
Today’s instability of ‘family life’ including the world’s highest per capita divorce rate, the growing divide between the haves and have not’s, the casualization of the workforce have all been factors in contributing to social instability. As usual it is the vulnerable who suffer the most. It is a reminder that if we want to fix society, we have to start with the basic social unit of the family. Fix the family and most of our problems would either disappear or greatly decline. As long as we continue undermining the basic social unit, our problems will continue.

Fantastic information, thanks guys. I would never have thought to hunt out this information from the available data. Really helps inform my views and opinions. The one statistic I was really hoping to see but did not was the number or % of under 18y.o. homeless.

Thanks for the input! We are currently in the process of putting the 2016 homeless estimate for each LGA onto a tile in the population highlights page (on profile.id) for our clients. This should be online by the end of the week. Unfortunately it’s just a single number at this stage – we may be able to do a limited change over time figure in future, but no breakdown into types of homelessness is available at an LGA level.

Hi Eliza, and thanks for your feedback. The difficulty is that with changes to local government areas (LGAs) and amalgamations we can’t display it for any LGA which has changed boundaries, and at the moment the tool doesn’t support having this feature for some areas and not others.
We know this is important, in demand information, and pointing to changes over time is at the heart of the story you want to tell – so we are working on it.

I’m particularly interested in the figures for the Gold Coast. Do you have such figures yet.
I know that it is would have to be an approximate figure as, by their very nature, the homeless often need to move around.

Hi Mary,
The homelessness figures we have available for the Gold Coast are available on the Gold Coast community profile (on the population highlights page) here – https://profile.id.com.au/gold-coast/highlights-2016. It’s just a single data point for now, linking to the ABS dataset if you wish to investigate further.

Its good the general public are being made aware of the issue but these figures are way off the mark, those struggling generally advise authorities they have some form of accomodation (for mailing purposes Etc). Funding has been stripped to the point multicultural services (Muslim communities etc) are assisting in ER food relief for our communities, our govt should be ashamed. Not too long ago left over food from major sporting arena’s In Sydney assisted with the ER in and around Sydney metropolitan to prevent hunger and waste, although clauses Were implemented to prevent this from occurring, although this was being directed by the way of fully licensed catering companies.

I think Austalian federal govt can learn from countries/states such as Singapore and California in building and managing clean efficient low cost public housing programmes (I know people who live in these developments and they are quite nice and safe) and national public train systems that are very affordable. There’s also option of tiny homes on federal land close to cities (now being trialled in UK). Communal housing should be increased for homeless single girls/women and boys/men (for safety of girls they should be gender based) . Cut the wages and perks of politicians and set up a low cost national housing and transport programme with all that money. After all, the politicians have not been serving the needs of the people for a while now. And seems they are too proud to learn from the success of other nations.

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